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Comment by BigRedDog1669 | Hacker News Reader

It seems pretty relevant here. Both prisons and the police are part of the government monopoly on violence.

The article is about prison mail. It has nothing to do with police officers and does not mention the "government monopoly on violence."

The OP is talking about why these kinds of things exist.

> The OP is talking about why these kinds of things exist.

No they are not:

>jails are powerful in all the wrong ways. . . . This is what corrupted power looks like. . . . Police departments are often the same.

The article talks about prisons scanning mail. The OP then says that prisons are corrupt, then throws in that by the way, police departments are too.

OP's opinion about police department corruption has nothing to do with the article about prison mail.

In the US a large number of incarceration facilities are ran by the county police (otherwise known as the Sheriff's department).

WellYesButActuallyNo.jpeg

The majority of jails in the US are run by county sheriffs or local law enforcement. The majority of prisons are run by the states.

That's like saying software is written in C vs Java. It's still software.

Jails are for very short sentences and short term pre-trial incarceration. This can lead to some really dumb "X% of people in jail Y" type states that sound outrageous until you realize that X is drawn from a very specific subset of the incarcerated population.

I wish it was as clear as string vs float, but it isn't. People get stuck in jails for 3-Undefined years all the time, all over the US. The only difference is "big state owned" and "many sizes incorporated area owned". Some states have laws that define this clearly, some don't. In many cases, even though it might be against the law, a prison is over-filled, so they outsource to county jails, and in others, the jail is over-filled so they outsource to another incarceration facility. It's a shit show, and I feel really bad for people that are caught in it.

Even worse, in some jurisdictions the incoming pipeline for hires routes through running the jail or prisons.

The mindset behind being a good cop and a good prison guard are totally different. Exposing hires to the corruption and violence inside prisons right before sending them to police the streets creates a very adversarial mindset against the public.

They are part of the same system where if one is happening it is more likely the idea will happen

Digitized mail is one more straw on the camel's back. It is an example of the deeper issue: the prison-industrial complex going backwards on rehabilitation, because it is following the bad incentives written into law.

Meanwhile, in Norway, the incarceration rate is 10x lower, while the 2-year recidivism is about 20% instead of the US's 50-60% [1].

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20100509171347/http://www.time.c...

Here's an idea: pay prisons a meaningful amount when people coming out of them stay out and/or get jobs. For example, a bonus each year for five years.

Another idea: penalize them for every death or recidivism.

I agree with all of that (except maybe the "another idea" that was added via your edit). The U.S. prison system is in need of deep reform and this article is another great example of why. It's a completely misguided proposal that puts yet another private and profit-driven entity in a position of power over prisoners, extracting money from them and providing little if any value to the system.

The article still has nothing to do with police departments, though.

Yes. To connect this with my point. The prisons will end up with a fancy IT mail system. The jail will be able to provide digital mail for a fee, while not providing physical safety for the inmates. Priorities are wrong.

>Here's an idea: pay prisons a meaningful amount when people coming out of them stay out and/or get jobs. For example, a bonus each year for five years.

I get that you see financial incentives to prisons as the solution. However, that doesn't really solve the problem. Because it's not the prison or its administrators who deny housing and employment to those released from prison.

Which is why many folks (myself included) support "Ban the box"[0] laws.

Unless and until the societal stigma of incarceration (or even just an arrest -- both are public records) is satisfactorily addressed, this issue can't be solved. And certainly not with incentives to prison administrators.

[0] https://www.paycor.com/resource-center/articles/ban-the-box-...

>The article is about prison mail. It has nothing to do with police officers and does not mention the "government monopoly on violence."

No. The article is about jail mail. While "prison" and "jail" are often used interchangeably, they are not (at least in the US) the same thing.

Jails are for folks being detained before trial (i.e., they are innocent as they haven't been proven/pled guilty) or incarcerated for minor crimes (with a sentence of less than 1-2 years).

Prisons are for people who have been convicted of serious crimes (with sentences longer than a year or two).

That's not to say that those in prison should be exploited/abused, but this policy change affects those who haven't even been convicted of a crime.

As a rule, I'm usually disgusted by the US "justice" system. I'm even more disgusted now.

It's about both prisons and jails. From the article:

> The proposed changes follow a nationwide trend of prisons and jails moving to stop incarcerated people from receiving physical mail. Prisons in Pennsylvania stopped physical mail in 2018, and prisons in Massachusetts started sending incarcerated people photocopies of original letters. Last year, prisons in New Mexico and Florida adopted similar changes, and Texas has also limited in-person mail.

Obviously it's a bit more relevant to prisons where prisoners tend to stay longer and are more likely to receive mail.

Also, none of this shows that the article has anything to do with police department corruption.

Yeah, but WRT this horrendously egregious policy, I didn't (and won't) address facilities other than NYC jails, as that's most relevant to me.

This article isn't about front line police, yet you keep bringing them up. Why is that?

In fact, I didn't mention the police at all (although, as others have noted, corrections officers generally are sworn LEOs), so I don't know why you have such a hard on for cops[0].

No, not all cops are sadistic, power-drunk scumbags. But one is too many. cf. Daniel Pantaleo[1], Derek Chauvin[2] or Joseph Franco[3]. There are hundreds more that we know about. Which leaves many, many more we don't know about.

Why don't you invite some of these folks over for dinner so you can tell them how much you love and respect them? Well not Chauvin, as he's in prison, but you better hurry because Mr. Franco will be soon too.

[0]When I was a kid, it was clear that the police were just the biggest and best armed gang -- with qualified immunity -- in NYC. And since I saw and experienced that dynamic a bunch of times over the years, the police themselves proved that to be true. Over and over again. There have been a few positive changes over the last decade or so, but not nearly enough. Certainly not enough to change my view of the police.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/nypd-officer-put-eric-garner-letha...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Chauvin

[3] https://abc7ny.com/joseph-franco-nypd-detective-convictions-...

Edit: Used "jail" when "prison" was the appropriate term. Fixed.

> This article isn't about front line police, yet you keep bringing them up. Why is that?

This is literally my point in this thread. The article is not about the police and I don't understand why people are steering the discussion that way.

>This is literally my point in this thread. The article is not about the police and I don't understand why people are steering the discussion that way.

I didn't even mention police. You did.

So who is it that's steering the discussion in that direction?

“Government monopoly on violence” is a phrase that I see constantly see on the internet that makes less and less sense the more you think about. Of all the news I read of killings near where I live none are the government doing it, and certainly it’s a minority of homicides nationally done by active government employees. And outside the world of crime there’s plenty of violent sports, plenty of violent non-criminal activity happens. I’d bet most people I know have experienced non government violence.

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